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Art Aid

As lockdown became a reality Kim could not settle to her normal home studio routine. Instead she started producing a series of art packs on natural history topics to inspire creative activity for our grandchildren being home schooled across the country….Here, in her own words, is Kim’s ‘Country Diary’.

One of the first sorrows of lockdown was not seeing our grandchildren. No amount of de-cluttering, gardening, wandering which of too many books to catch up on, or whatsapping and facetiming could replace the time I love making a mess with art and craft next to a small child. So it became a prime rescue task for home schooled grandchildren and their trying-to-do-it-all-and-work parents, to send along some ‘make-and-do’.

Raking through art supplies in the studio was no problem and living out in the countryside provided the themes. The Art of Trees led to dressing bare identifiable silhouettes with their cut out and colour in leaf types.

Butterflies. Six common species to identify, colour in and take flight with found sticks

Collage Gardens asked for inventive solutions to playing with plant shapes using magazine papers, then adding bees and butterflies.

Funny Animals was a chance to decorate air dry clay with alder cones and other found materials.

Birds and Eggs had children making newspaper nests for garden birds like robins, blue tits and goldfinches, with their eggs.

Then Grandma could sit back and enjoy the feedback from all ten little ones aged 2 – 10 (grandchildren of some friends included) who had a go, with results as various as the nature they’d been trying to observe.